Something
that pops up in science fiction a lot is people uploading their consciousness
to a computer. Currently there seems to
be an overly optimistic camp who think we’ll be able to do this in the next
five years, and an overly pessimistic camp who think our brains are too complex
to ever run on a computer. I believe
that we may have a 5% chance to pull it off in the next century, but in the
long run it will be a near certainty. In
fact, I think the only thing that would actually stop us from eventually
uploading our consciousnesses would be our extinction.
But
the point of this blog is that this won’t be something we figure out
overnight. There will be intermediate
steps, such as uploading the consciousness of a lower animal, like a cat or
dog. Would there be a benefit to doing
such a thing? Yeah. If you can upload a cat, you could also build
some sort of interface. Now, if you ask
your living cat “Why do you have to be in my way?” you may get an odd look and
a “Mrow.” But with an interface, you could get an answer from your virtual
cat. It wouldn’t be “Because I, Grithnar
the Magnificent take pleasure from your discomfort,” but something more akin to
a series of computer code of the “If this situation, take this action” type. We can get a feel for some of these codes from
observation of the living cat, but an interface could give us an actual view of
the evolutionary programming code at the core of behavior.
And
once we know how such animals work, there’s a chance we could change them. We could run simulations to see what training
methods would actually work. Initially,
the uploading process might be destructive, meaning we could only apply it to
other animals. But as the technique
improved, it’s likely your cat or dog would survive and you could take what you
learned from the uploaded version and apply it to the living version.
But
if we can upload from a dog to a computer, it’s possible we could download from
the computer into the dog. Give it a
sort of obedience patch. Imagine getting
a puppy and housebreaking it with a few keystrokes. And in a few years you could get the patch to
make it a “quivering, snarling, white-hot ball of canine terror” at the snap of
a finger.
Which
makes you wonder, what will they do once we can upload humans?
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